New Beginnings

16 Nov 2015

I've decided to give my little personal website a nice clean reboot; a new beginning. If time permits, I hope to fill this void with better & more up-to-date content. This will be a place for the occasional programmer rant. But more importantly, to note down things I've learnt so far that I find valuable and worthy of sharing.

To kick things off, here's a little background on what I've decided to do differently this time around. In place of wordpress, I will instead be using Jekyll and hosting everything on GitHub Pages. If you are already familiar with git and have a GitHub account, you should totally take a look at Jekyll.

What is Jekyll?

In a nutshell, Jekyll is a blog aware static site generator. From the project's readme:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory [...] and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.

Posts are written in plain-text with markdown. Jekyll will take care of converting markdown to html, beautifying the content and generating static pages.

Why Jekyll?

For starters, there are no more databases to manage and backup. And also none of the nasty wordpress hacks or exploits to worry about. Things become slightly easier and better with just static pages.

Plus, when using Jekyll with GitHub Pages, you get the added benefit of full revision history. Easily create, upgrade or rollback your content by pushing to your GitHub repository. All that is required is a text editing program to write your posts and an internet connection to execute a "git push".